CWE-409: Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data… | Glexia
CWE-409 (Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-409: Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Amplification,DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU),DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory): System resources, CPU and memory, can be quickly consumed. This can lead to poor system performance or system crash.
Developer Pattern
CWE-409 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-409, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-409: Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)
The product does not handle or incorrectly handles a compressed input with a very high compression ratio that produces a large output.
An example of data amplification is a "decompression bomb," a small ZIP file that can produce a large amount of data when it is decompressed.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The DTD and the very brief XML below illustrate what is meant by an XML bomb. The ZERO entity contains one character, the letter A. The choice of entity name ZERO is being used to indicate length equivalent to that exponent on two, that is, the length of ZERO is 2^0. Similarly, ONE refers to ZERO twice, therefore the XML parser will expand ONE to a length of 2, or 2^1. Ultimately, we reach entity THIRTYTWO, which will expand to 2^32 characters in length, or 4 GB, probably consuming far more data than expected.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.